Customer relationship management

Customer relationship management (CRM) is an approach to managing a company's interaction with current and potential future customers. It tries to analyze data about customers' history with a company and to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth.

One important aspect of the CRM approach is the systems of CRM that compile data from a range of different communication channels, including a company's website, telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials, and more recently, social media. Through the CRM approach and the systems used to facilitate it, businesses learn more about their target audiences and how to best cater to their needs. However, adopting the CRM approach may also occasionally lead to favoritism within an audience of consumers, resulting in dissatisfaction among customers and defeating the purpose of CRM.

The idea of customer relationship management began evolving in the early 1970s, when customer satisfaction was evaluated using annual surveys or by front-line asking. At that time, businesses had to rely on standalone mainframe systems to automate sales, but the extent of technology allowed them to categorize customers in spreadsheets and lists. The key year was 1982, when Kate and Robert Kestnbaum introduced the concept of Database marketing, namely applying statistical methods to analyze and gather customer data.

Four years later, Pat Sullivan and Mike Muhney from Dallas released their customer evaluation system called ACT! based on the principle of digital rolexes, offering for the first time a well-shaped contact management service.

The trend was followed by numerous developers trying to maximize leads' potential, including Tom Siebel, who signed the first CRM product Siebel Systems in 1993. Nevertheless, customer relationship management as a term became popular only in 1997, thanks to the work of Siebel, Gartner, and IBM. In the period between 1997 and 2000, leading CRM products were enriched with enterprise resource planning functions, and shipping and marketing capabilities.

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